In Brief
The Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh is a brewpub inside a deconsecrated Gothic church, its tanks set down where the high altar stood. Staff say a young woman in white still drifts the old sanctuary, and the kitchen has a presence of its own.
The Full Story
At the Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh, the staff keep seeing a young woman in white drift through the dining room. They put her at 16 to 22, exceptionally pale, moving like she's looking for someone she can't find. They've spotted her on the rectory stairs, near the altar, and out in the middle of the sanctuary, sometimes appearing to pray. One employee watched her walk straight into a dark storage room. There was no one in it.
The room she haunts used to be a sanctuary. The building went up in 1902 as St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, designed by the Beezer Brothers, and it held Mass in Lawrenceville until 1993, when the Diocese of Pittsburgh deconsecrated it. Sean Casey bought the shell and opened the brewpub in 1996. He kept the rose window, the choir loft, the hand-cut pews as restaurant seating, and a confessional behind the bar. The fermentation tanks he set down where the high altar used to stand. People drink beer brewed on the altar.
Nobody agrees who the woman is. One story makes her a refugee who sheltered in the church during the 1936 flood. Another names her an 18-year-old parishioner taken by the 1918 flu, though no record ties that name to her. A third says she's a bride left waiting at the altar. The staff have told all three for years and matched none of them to a death.
She is not the only one. The kitchen has a separate presence the cooks learned to work in pairs around. Something tugs at them and follows them and goes quiet when they're not alone. One source says they call it Bob. Around the rest of the building, people report disembodied voices, footsteps over empty rooms, items moving or vanishing, power tools that unplug and replug themselves, and faint organ music from an organ that no longer plays.
In the summer of 2021, the owner had heard enough stories about noises in unoccupied spaces that he let a Ghost Hunters crew spend three nights working the property, which takes in not just the church but the attached rectory and the old parish school. The episode, "The Haunted Brewery," aired in January 2022.
When people pushed back on what Casey had done with the building, he had a question he kept asking. "What do you mean by sacred?" The pushback subsided. The woman on the altar stairs never did.
